What Makes Austin City Limits So Special?

The show most closely identified with our city is PBS’ long-running live-music extravaganza

By Tracey E. W. Laird

Published: May 31, 2017

Lyle Lovette

Photo by Scott Newton

The show most closely identified with our city is PBS’ long-running live-music extravaganza. The woman who wrote the book on ACL (actually, two books), Tracey E. W. Laird, explains why it remains so special.

No musical institution so fully epitomizes the city of Austin as does the PBS concert showcase Austin City Limits. A decade-and-a-half before the city officially adopted its “Live Music Capital of the World” slogan, ACL conveyed the city’s spirit of joy in music. ACL took root in what you might call Austin’s classical era, when cowboys and hippies drew together over Old Golds and Falstaff, Sir Douglas music and low rent. The funky, quirky spirit of places like the Armadillo World Headquarters—places that linger only in memories of older Austinites—broadcast to the nation beginning in 1975, with Willie Nelson’s iconic pilot episode.

ACL changed over the four decades since, in phases and stages roughly set to the toe-tap of decades: progressive country (1970s), Nashville-centered country (1980s), roots music and singer-songwriters (1990s). Yet these categorical labels belie an institution that never fell in with the two-step about needing clear-cut borders between musical genres. Hints of the eclectic showcase pop up in its earliest seasons when, for instance, Roy Clark shared the stage with Gatemouth Brown.

Spotlighting more than one single genre, ACL communicates the city’s deep appreciation for the experience of live music. Beyond the ears or even the eyes, live music takes over the body’s pulse: it channels pitch and rhythm like a heart pumping blood through arteries. It opens spaces for deeper communion that listeners experience as transcendence or kinship.

In its approach to production, ACL anticipates the ever-unfolding, never-guaranteed possibilities for live music. ACL creates the circumstances in which energy can unfold, then steps out of the way and lets that energy be. The secret of the production is space, a central catalyst for musical vitality. Space allows spontaneity to unfold. Spontaneity, in turn, leads to musicians interacting with an audience. Over 43 years of creating space for music, ACL has built a memorial to a music-loving city via hundreds of live performances by many of the best musicians of our time.

If Austin City Limits is an ambassador of Austin’s music love to the larger world, it is also a stabilizing force. Neither the city nor the show has steered a straight course over the past four decades. The hustlers, movers, and shakers drawn to centers of musical energy also sometimes churn anxiety in their wake. ACL has been a ballast of Austin’s ship—a counterbalance for market-driven disquietudes. The show has consistently floated a love for music with sincerity rather than the bedazzlement so often associated with televised music.

ACL’s staff members craft every episode with as much love and verve as the musicians onstage. It’s these people who wed the show to Austin. They embody the attitudes that make the program a lasting institution: They are intrepid, flexible, discriminating, and ever-conducive to the unforeseen delights of the next performance.

Tracey E. W. Laird is a professor of music at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia; author of Austin City Limits: A History; andthe co-author (with spouse Brandon W. Laird) of Austin City Limits: A Monument to Music.